New DVD Review: INCIDENT AT LOCH NESS

I was worried, for a second, about Werner Herzog. Grizzly Man, his documentary on Timothy Treadwell, scored an undisputed triumph at this year's Sundance Film Festival, and that's great. It goes some way towards allaying the fear, spawned by Incident at Loch Ness - Herzog's last project previous to Grizzly Man - that the once-fearsome German filmmaker had officially and fatally succumbed to the destiny of so many outlaws unlucky enough to survive into middle-age: the desperate free-fall into self-parody.

I figured it was a slippery slope, one Herzog started to slide down when he "acted" in Harmony Korine's 1999 Dogme film Julien Donkey-Boy (a film that I actually admired), in which Herzog lampooned his own reputation as a diabolical dictator with the straightest of all faces, playing a cough-syrup addicted father/garden-hose wielding sadist. And then, last fall, he struck again, delivering an even broader performance of "Werner Herzog" in director Zak Penn's little seen docu-maybe-mentary, Incident at Loch Ness.